Gilat’s Stimulus

So there’s $7.2 billion set aside for "broadband stimulus" in the U.S., and €1 billion in Europe for 100% connectivity. Spend it.

Satcom service providers have been barking at this "no broadband for us" market for years. Along comes Wildblue and blows the incumbents away with their success (Hughes/DirecWay and Spacenet/Starband). Game-changing technology? Not really.

Can satcom really get a piece of these stimuli? After reading the Gilat earnings call transcript, don’t hold your breath:

 Jonathan Ho – William Blair

In terms of this Obama and the European stimulus that you guys were mentioning, can you give us a little bit more color on maybe the potential opportunities there and maybe the timeframe that you keep, something flowing out of that opportunity?

Amiram Levinberg

You have similar things in US, the way we begin are not clear. So at this point of time, we have so many people who have to give suggestions and comments and show often advantages to different committees. And we are part of this process. In part, we are cooperating with other companies in our industry and in part obviously at the end of the day, different companies will come with different applications.

We are not at the application stage at this point of time as the rule we begin or not, completely clear at this point, but we’ve definitely lost the [share point], lost opportunity by many people including ourselves.

In Europe, with stimulus for broadband is somewhat smaller, not to be small money, but it is somewhat smaller, it’s €1 billion and I have to say that because, unlike the situation in the US where we have a subsidiary on the job namely Spacenet, in the US, our activity is somewhat more remote because we need to get connected with local sales providers, so we are bit more remote in that situation in Europe.

 

 

 

Does he really know what’s going on?  Sounds like a Family Feud contestant: "show me, clueless CEO!"